Jan. 29, 2011

Andy Baio recently wrote a post about a line chart that had accompanied some research from Netflix about the streaming video performance across various ISPs. The chart was ostensibly informative, but due to the colors that they chose for each line, it ended up being nearly useless for people with red-green colorblindness.

Andy went on to create a more colorblind-safe version of the chart, but what I found even more interesting is that he closed his post with an anecdote relating his interactions with the Snopes folks. (Snopes, if you’re not familiar with it, is a popular site that fact-checks various urban legends.) As it would happen, Snopes’ category pages—in which they summarize the “True” / “Not True” status of each item in that category—was making use of shades of red (“false”) and green (“true”) spheres that weren't all that accessible. In fact, for someone with red-green colorblindness (which affects around 5–8% of all men), the colors were virtually indistinguishable.

(Even if you may not be colorblind, this kind of thing can be easily tested with freely available software such as Color Oracle. If you install that, you can see this for yourself by loading any of Snopes’ index pages and selecting “Deuteranopia” from Color Oracle’s menu.)

Andy went so far as to create some accessible versions of those color spheres (keeping them red and green, but mostly changing them to a different shade) and he offered them to the Snopes people with the hope that they might put those to use. The change would have made their site much more usable to persons with colorblindness while maintaining the site’s overall aesthetic. Oddly enough, they refused and decided, instead, to write a FAQ entry on the subject:

We chose our red-yellow-green coding system because its “traffic light” pattern can be understood by most of our readers with little or no explanation. While we understand that about 8% of our readership experiences some form of color blindness and therefore cannot distinguish the different colors of bullets, other alternatives we have tried have proved confusing to many of our non-color blind readers. Therefore, we have chosen to stick with a system that works very well for 92% of our readers.

If we take a closer look at the numbers relating to colorblindness, that 5–8% means that between 1 in 20 and 1 in 12 men will have difficulty using Snopes.com. By way of analogy, around 1.6 million Americans use wheelchairs. While that may be ½% of the US population, the public has every expectation that businesses will help accommodate persons with wheelchairs through the use of wheelchair ramps and the like. And rightly so. (It’s also the law.) Whether one’s eyes, limbs, or other parts of one’s body, disabilities can affect all of us. That’s why I was so astounded when I learned that the people behind Snopes had no interest in the assistance that was offered to them.

If you’re not familiar with the Stylish, you can think of it along the lines of Greasemonkey but for CSS. Put another way, Stylish can automagically insert CSS into a page whenever you visit a particular site. It’s available for both Firefox and Chrome.